A Fatal Stain (15 page)

Ben came out of my bedroom, fully dressed and with his tie on, and headed for his briefcase, which he’d left by
the door. I put my hand over the receiver to tell him, “Cas has made eggs.” If I was going to encourage Cas to betray Ben’s location, I might as well compensate in advance.

Ben hesitated minimally, which he wouldn’t have done, I will note, if I had cooked the eggs, then whispered, “Got to go. Late for work. You really should have a working alarm clock.”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes because at this point I was afraid they would stick somewhere up in my cranium. “Ben, you have an alarm clock at home you could—”

Unfortunately, in my enthusiasm, I’d uncovered the phone receiver. My dad heard it, and said, “Is that Ben? Does he know that you killed some woman over a table? Is he still willing to marry you?”

Now Ben’s eyebrows went up, and he shook his head as he grabbed his briefcase and headed out the door. Oh, boy, when Dad got hold of the wrong end of the stick, it was usually the wrong end of a stick from another world.

“Come on,” Cas called. “Eggs are ready.”

“Who is that man?” my dad asked.

“My fianc.”

“Odd, he doesn’t sound like Ben.”

“He’s not Ben.”

“You threw Ben over for someone else? Why, just two days ago he was in here, planning the wedding with your mother.”

I bit my tongue short of saying that my mother should marry Ben, then. Instead, I said, “Uh, Dad, can I call you back?”

“No. Just come here. We shouldn’t talk about this on the phone. The police might be tapping the line.”

I hung up, to find Cas looming over me. “Why am I
tapping your line?” he asked. The confusion on his face meant only that he had not grown up with my dad—which was a good thing—and therefore simply couldn’t fathom Dad’s thought processes.

“I think,” I said, speaking carefully, because I probably didn’t want to scare the nice man who meant to marry me—I mean, he had to know there was insanity in the family, but he didn’t need to know how much insanity—“because I threw Ben over for you.”

But Cas, for all his lack of experience with my family, was clearly more resilient than it would appear. He put his arm around me and guided me toward the kitchen. “Good thing,” he said, approvingly. “I don’t think Nick is into threesomes.”

He sat me down at the table, fed imaginary oats to Ccelly, and acted for all the world as though my best friend hadn’t spent the night on my sofa and taken first dibs on the shower. As though my father hadn’t called to accuse me of a murder that had probably happened only in Dad’s somewhat—okay, extremely—delusional mind. As though my son didn’t insist on taking an imaginary llama with him everywhere. An imaginary llama that wore sneakers.

Look, I’d understand this completely had Cas been one eyed, one legged, five feet tall, and clinically insane. But he was well over six feet tall and built like your best type of classical god. And he had a smile that made me go jelly inside. Of course, it was possible he was clinically insane, but the police normally screened for that sort of thing, didn’t they?

I shoved a forkful of fluffy eggs in my mouth and looked up to find him smiling at me. “I’m going to take
a shower. I’ll pick you up at one to take you to look at the house, okay? I assume you’re going to see your dad?”

“I think I have to,” I admitted reluctantly.

“Of course. He’s quite capable of escaping town with a briefcase of mysteries bolted to his wrist otherwise. And then your mom would be upset at us and make us go find him. You know that never ends well.”

So he showered while I finished breakfast and washed up. Then I bathed E and then myself, resisting the demand that I bathe Ccelly by telling E that llamas licked themselves clean. Someday, in some zoo, my son was going to see a real llama, and then he would never trust me again. It was a risk I was willing to take.

I got him into the car and drove to the store. My parents had started the store accidentally. Or, rather, my dad had started the store accidentally. I was fairly sure my mother had meant to start it. At least I hoped so, as otherwise they would be the first accidentally successful merchants in history. My dad had inherited a three-story Victorian from his grandmother. Being then out of high school, he’d moved into the house with all his books. Knowing Dad and how many books he had, I supposed that was enough to fill every room in the house from floor to ceiling several times over.

There he might have stayed the rest of his life, till eventually someone had found him dead in the pile of books, possibly eaten by bookworm. But somehow, at a mystery convention, he’d met Mom.

I have yet to understand how she got him to notice her long enough to engage in conversation and marry—my conception was an enigma that even I had no intention of prodding—but she had managed this, and, upon coming
home with him, she’d hung up the sign
Remembered Murder
over the entrance and started selling books. Eventually, she’d cleared the upper floors enough to have furniture and a somewhat normal house. Oh, we still had bookcases everywhere, including the two bathrooms. If only enough companies had the foresight to print their books in washable paper, we’d probably have books in the shower as well. But there was room to walk around, and there was even some more or less normal furniture.

Now, usually when I visited, I went around to the backyard—which I’d once set fire to, in an unfortunate gas-bottle-on-the-grill accident—and up the staircase that Mom had bullied Dad into building to the kitchen door on the second floor.

Today, I had to go into the store first. For one, I needed to figure out whether the reason Dad was convinced I had murdered someone was because he had murdered someone and was now trying to figure out how to hide the body in the stacks. Yes, I knew it was unlikely. On the other hand, Dad had come up with some interesting notions in the past.

I took hold of E and explained, in as stern a voice as I dared, that he was not to tear, bite, or in any other way do anything that might damage books, including but not limited to breaking the spine by opening them too wide. E nodded meekly.

The thing is, I had no idea how much E could read, and since the time when he’d taken a book into the store restroom to wash, Father had treated him like an entire—very small—invading army.

This time was no different. The moment E stepped over the threshold, Dad pointed a trembling finger at him.
“You,” he said. “You have no business coming into a bookstore.”

E looked at him a moment, then did his best imitation of an angel, and said, “Hi, Grandad. This is Ccelly.” He pointed to the invisible llama he held at the other end of an invisible rope. “Ccelly is a well-behaved llama. I won’t let her eat anything. May I sit by the fireplace and play with Ccelly?”

My father seemed completely disarmed by all that charm. He looked at my son and nodded in an almost military way. “Very well,” he said. “But mind you, I’ll be keeping an eye on you.”

E went to the sofas, where he sprawled, talking to something we had to assume was Ccelly. My father stood by the register glaring at him.

“Dad,” I said. “You told me you wanted to see me.”

He turned to me and for a few breaths seemed not to have the slightest notion of who I was. I’d never actually figured out if this lack of memory was true or an act, because when the situation got dire enough, he remembered my name and even Ben’s. Once or twice he even seemed to remember Mom’s. But I suspect most of the time the three of us and everyone else just fell into that vast and confusing category of objects that had no covers or titles, which made it very difficult for him to remember exactly who we were and what we were all about.

After staring at me, he said, “Oh, Sherlockia. I didn’t see you there!”

“Hi, Dad,” I said. The name was a battle I not only wasn’t going to fight, but from which I would run as far and fast as possible. “You asked me to come and talk to you.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, but he didn’t seem to know what
he was saying. I waited for the world to stabilize for him. You see, as far as Dad is concerned, it’s not so much that he can’t remember people. That’s part of it, of course. But the main problem—once he identifies the walking-talking nonbook advantage—is figuring out when it is and what might pertain to it. Sometimes I suspects he views life as a book, where you can advance the pages forward or backward and tune in wherever you wish to. That or he’s completely insane, but I’d rather prefer the page thing.

“Oh, yeah. Why did you kill someone over a table?”

“Dad?” Of course my mind was going on about the table, and the stains on it, and what Dad might know about all of it. “Why do you think I killed someone? I didn’t, but I’d like to know why you think that.”

“Well,” Dad said, “it was obvious when he came here and said that he wanted to know where you’d got the table and if what interested you were the bloodstains.”

If I had dog ears, they’d have stood up and at attention. “Bloodstains? He…Who was he, Dad? What did he look like?”

“Oh, you know him. The guy that you asked about the table.”

I tried to imagine the man from the semi-permanent garage sale coming into the bookstore, but the picture wouldn’t quite gel. Dad would have kicked him out on smell alone. Mind you, Dad was so protective of the books that he would apologize to those he had to sell, and he often tried to go out of his way not to part with them. A man who smelled that badly and who looked like he’d never read a book in his life would get kicked out of the bookstore on suspicion of intending harm to books. Dad had been known to ask people to leave for looking at a book in a funny manner.

Then I thought of another person the “he” might be. “Was he dark haired, Dad? With his hair in a ponytail? Perhaps smelling a little of tobacco?”

Now Dad looked at me like I’d taken leave of my senses. “No, no. The skinny blond with the pop eyes.” He made an expression imitating someone who, if the impersonation was accurate, would have looked like a cartoon character just before his eyes popped out and he had to chase them across the floor. The problem was that I had never seen anyone like that.

I didn’t doubt Dad had seen him, though, because, again, Dad talking about a table right now—no matter how erratic his mind or memory—was too much of a coincidence. It strained disbelief. It was obvious someone had been here talking about a table and that the table was somehow linked with bloodstains and, in Dad’s head at least, with me. Which meant the person must have mentioned the table, blood, and me.

“What did he say, Dad?”

“Uh? Not much. He said you’d bought a table and you’d…No. He didn’t say you’d put bloodstains on it, only I assumed you had, because otherwise, why was he so worried about the whole thing? But he said that you…that there were bloodstains on it somehow, and he said that if you continued asking questions and putting your nose where it didn’t belong, you were going to find yourself in trouble.”

“Did he give you a name?”

“Yeah. Yours. He said Mrs. Dare.”

Mrs. Dare. The same thing that Sebastian had called me. But even my dad couldn’t think that Sebastian was blond and had pop eyes. “I see,” I said. “And how did
you know he didn’t mean Mom?” Though if he did, the coincidence in that alone was phenomenal.

“Nah. He said the young Mrs. Dare.”

“I see,” I said. It was clear as mud, which of course was about how things got when I was around Dad. All the same, I wondered how person or persons unknown had managed to track me to the bookstore. This time—I was fairly sure of it—I hadn’t been toting a bookstore bag around. Unless I had an invisible bag, just like E had Ccelly. I was about to check for any unusual weight on my hands when Mom came in, carrying Fluffy.

Mom is a small, delicate, doll-like woman. Fluffy is the perfect mystery cat: the white Persian that the villain usually caresses. Her actual name was Fluffy the Second, like book two of a trilogy. The original Fluffy was the cat I’d grown up with. We’d been great friends until I was about six and decided to play lion tamer and make Fluffy jump through Mom’s quilting frame, which I’d set on fire.

After the fire department had come, and Fluffy had been taken to the vet, most of her fur had grown back in. And yet, she’d never forgiven me. She’d lived well into her twenties, in, I think, the hope I’d die before her. Whenever I stayed at Mom and Dad’s, she’d pee on my bed.

When she’d finally died, Mom got a little white kitten she’d named Fluffy the Second, and, in proof that reincarnation might be true beyond silly television shows, Fluffy was born with undying hate for me in her heart.

Now fully grown, Daughter of Fluffy: The Grudge Continues still hated me as much as the original had. She drew herself up in Mom’s arms and hissed just as Mom looked at me with a smile so vague and misty that she might be as unmoored in time and space as Dad. At least
she did not call me Sherlockia. Or even Agatha, which was her preferred name for me. Instead she said, “Ah, Dyce. I’m glad you dropped by. I’ve been meaning to talk to you about Fluffy.”

“Uh…what?”

“Fluffy,” Mom said, and made a gesture with her arms as though she meant to hand me the cat. Fortunately, I was wearing long sleeves and a jacket over my sweater.

“It’s funny,” Mom said, as she looked at the parallel cuts left by Fluffy’s claws on my jacket’s sleeve. “She almost never does that.”

I didn’t say anything. She always did that to me. “Yes,” I said, stepping back and trying to keep out of reach of the devil cat. “What did you want to ask me about Fluffy? I really don’t know any good exorcists.” I didn’t dare add that fire solved most such problems. For some reason, Mom didn’t see Fluffy the same way I did. In fact, for a brief and confused time she’d thought Fluffy would make a good friend for Pythagoras and had tried to bring her by for visits. It wasn’t until Fluffy had taken a big bite out of Pythagoras’s tail that I’d managed to convince Mom to stop the forced cat-socialization program.

Mom looked confused, as if Fluffy and exorcists didn’t go together like bowl and spoon. “What? No, no. I was thinking about your wedding. You know, Fluffy is already all white.”